Prejudices of the Imagination: What Adam Smith Added to the Enlightenment Project
In this talk, moral philosopher Professor Samuel Fleischacker, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse.
He discussed how Adam Smith employs techniques in his Wealth of Nations that he had developed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments to change his readers’ prejudicial image of poor people.
He then considered the significance of the fact that Smith combats a prejudice by presenting a new image of the group targeted by that prejudice, rather than responding to wrong-headed beliefs about that group. That suggests that Adam Smith had a rather different conception of prejudice than most of his Enlightenment peers — and anticipated critical strategies that have been fully developed only in recent times.